third/fourth wave midwifery and spinning babies

do you remember that democracy now! with melissa harris lacewell and gloria steinem talking about hillary and barack earlier this year?

it is one of the greatest exchanges that happened during the election imho.

it was the difference between second wave and third wave feminism…i know we are not supposed to acknowledge the difference between the generations approach to feminism…but i need the analogy to explain third/fourth wave midwifery…

well, alot of the midwives that i have met (primarily in minneapolis) are second wave midwives.  they have fought so hard for legal recognition that everything else becomes secondary or tertiary in their view.  and they are very protective over the ‘gains’ they have made, no matter how the privileging of ‘certified’ and ‘insured’ midwives has been not only negligent but destructive to women of color, the queer community, sexual and trauma survivors, imprisoned women, and many more marginalized in the birth community and in the world at large.

what they seemed to be much more concerned with is protecting their status and the status of certified midwives in order to advance their cause.  they do so by looking toward women’s cultures that are black and brown and saying: see!  see!  those women have ‘natural’ birth.  and we, white women, are using those black and brown exotic women’s cultures as a model for us to change birth in our white communities.

unassisted childbirth

today i am going to hip you to the unassisted birth culture.  frankly, for all the strangenesses and weird alliances (can you say witches and fundamentalist christians sharing notes on childbirth?) i love this movement…and this blog has in large part been an exploration on the empowerment of women during pregnancy, birth, and mamahood and i believe that unassisted birth is a large part of that.

unassisted birth (a birth without birth professionals) is not everyone’s or most people’s imagined ideal birth scenario.  actually i was talking to my teacher from palestine a week ago and when i mentioned home births he said: people still do that?  ha ha ha.  but i do believe that in the core of our culture we need to know that birth happens.  it does not do so because of any professional or any machine, it simply happens because that is how the human race brings forth the next generation.  and that each of us has the right to decide what we are going to do with our bodies. we must decide for ourselves whether and how we are going to conceive, carry, deliver and  care for our young.  we must learn the ways that our body and our minds communicate to our person.  that the bodies intuition must guide us.  and if that intuition says scheduled c-section, then do it.  and if it says give birth in the woods next to a lake on a bed of mushrooms, do it. 

we do not live in a culture that honors this knowing.  and for those of us who seek this knowing without the vestiges and garb of patriarchy, white supremacy, homophobia, and other oppressions, it is harder for us, because we are going against the grain of ‘motherhood’.  our culture does not have models for anti-oppressive revolutionary pregnancy and birth.  and so we have added burdens (as if we do not have enough already) of creating these models, living these models, and sometimes, dying by these models.  these models which are so life-affirming and yet because they are so heretical to the ‘powers that be’ give our culture’s leaders permission to jeopardize our life and our children’s life in order to discredit these life-giving paradigms.  and yet we must continue to fight.  not simply for ourselves, or our children, but for the women who are looking for models…they must learn that they have the power to create their own.